Last night, after Twitter accepted his $44 billion bid to buy the company, Elon Musk traveled to South Texas, where SpaceX is building prototypes for a rocket system designed to take people to Mars someday. Earlier, he had shared some of his to-do list for the social-media company he could soon own outright: “enhancing the product with new features,” “defeating the spam bots,” and making the platform’s algorithms public and available for anyone to see. But that evening, his to-do list was more concrete. According to the author Walter Isaacson, who is writing a Musk biography, the billionaire “held his regular 10 pm meeting on Raptor engine design, where he spent more than an hour working on valve leak solutions. No one mentioned Twitter,” Isaacson tweeted. “He can multitask."
Certainly no one doubts that Musk—already the head of SpaceX, Tesla, the Boring Company, and Neuralink—can multitask. The murkiest question about his newest acquisition is not whether he can switch between space travel and social media but what he’s thinking about free speech when he’s not contemplating valves. Right now, before he takes charge of his new business, the most anyone can do is make educated guesses about how Musk’s stance as a self-described “free speech absolutist” might manifest, and read his tweets like sopping tea leaves at the bottom of a mug.